Making Edge AI Devices Smaller, Faster, Cooler, Dustproof and Waterproof | The Six Five Summit

It is day three here at the six five Summit 2024. We are talking modern work. And if you've tuned into any of our sessions, day one, two, or three here, you'll know it's all about ai.

It's not only, uh, enabling the build out of ai, like real customer benefit from, from ai, but also building out the ecosystem and the infrastructure for that. And as we know with AI comes increased processing power, more memory, more storage, and even changes on the networking side. But the one thing we haven't talked about is how do I keep all of this infrastructure cool.

But we're gonna talk about that. 'cause I have here Shu from FRO Systems. We have had him on the six five before.

But welcome back. Thank you Patrick. It's great to be back.

Can you talk about the company and the types of problems you're trying to solve? Sure. We are a 5-year-old Silicon Valley startup and uh, we set out to create a solid state active cooling chip.

Now this is unheard of because when it comes to thermal, the only options that people have had so far is to use mechanical fans. That's right. But that's centuries old technology.

With the rapid improvement in computing, uh, there was a huge need for bringing new technology and new innovation into thermal. So we started this company to build the world's first solid state active cooling chip. And that's exactly what we did.

It took us four years to build a chip and we were able to proudly introduce it to the industry at the CS that I was talking about, uh, last year. Yeah. So the chip itself, you know, is, you know, as you, as you rightly, you know, described it last time we talked, you know, it's a chip that cools other chips.

It's kind of like, uh, you know, when you think about it, it's obvious that everything should move to semiconductors when it comes to building these state-of-the-art computing platforms. But thermal had not. And we are the company that is moving thermal into the domain of semiconductors.

'cause what that means is that you can make them much thinner. You can make them silent, and also you can actually innovate much faster so that every year you can continue to improve the performance of the active cooling chip much, much faster than, uh, you would see, uh, in the domain of, uh, the current technologies like fans. Yeah, it is cool.

Chips, cooling, other chips, that's very meta and high tech sisu. Uh, the whole theme of, of the six five summit is, is about AI and getting more out of AI and, uh, increasing this just torrid pace of, of build out here. So what are your views on, on device, uh, ai?

I'm, I'm assuming it creates an opportunity for you that may not have been nearly as big before. It was a big opportunity for us before, but now the need for a solid state active cooling chip is just increasing exponentially. Because think about it.

You know, uh, if you look at any computing platform, uh, particularly at the edge, you have very sophisticated, uh, systems on shape SOCs that have CPUs and GPUs and all sorts of other dedicated, uh, hardware core in them. And they are individually very, very powerful and they're running at full hilt in order to deliver the user experience that these devices are able to offer. But now bring in AI and you introduced a, a new subsystem called the NPU or the Neural Processing Unit, and that is now going to demand a lot of power as well.

So you got the CPUs and the GPUs that they have their day job. Now you got to punch that with an NPU, which also is going to consume a lot of power. So the amount of power budget and the thermal budget and the thermal envelope your device needs is just double.

So how are you going to do that? You know, many of these devices are very compact and waterproof and dustproof, so you couldn't possibly think about putting a fan in them. 5 millimeters in thickness and can slide in and improve the thermal envelope of even the tiniest and the slimmest devices that you have in the market today.

Yeah, it's, I think the first time we talked too about your technology, I, I think I said it's a no brainer, uh, for not only what it was when you started four years ago, but even more as we find ourselves in this conundrum of we can't get enough performance, uh, we wanna keep, uh, form factors of any device, uh, thinner, and we want it to be, uh, a lot, uh, a lot quieter. So let's turn up the contrast ratio on fans versus Air Jett here. Can you talk just very distinctly and comparatively on the uniqueness, uh, about Air Jett compared to fans?

Absolutely, absolutely. The first thing is that we are going to devices that are two thin for fans and also devices that need to be dust proof and water water resistance. We did a great, you know, showcase where basically we took the Apple MacBook Air, which is the highest selling, you know, laptop out there in the market today.

And the MacBook Air is super thin. It is a thinnest laptop that's available in the market today. And it's so thin that it's fan less because you really couldn't put a fan in there.

But it comes at the penalty that because you don't have a fan, it has a much smaller thermal envelope. And so the M three processor that runs in the MacBook Air is basically only getting half the performance that it is really capable of. And you can see the difference because if you bought a MacBook Pro with the same M three processor, you'd get twice the performance as you would in a MacBook Air, which has the same processor.

The difference is really the thermal solution. One doesn't have a fan, the other has a fan, one doesn't have a fan because it's too thin. So what we did was we took the same MacBook Air and without changing the ID one iota, we were able to put in our air jet mini chips in it, and we were able to show that you can double the performance and reach the same performance as a MacBook Pro.

So that is, I think, a clear cut example, uh, that illustrates how the Jet Mini chip can con significantly improve the performance of ultra thin devices that are too thin for a fan. 5 millimeters in thickness, you can slide them in and get all the performance that you deserve. Yeah, it's really cool.

I mean, customers can even kind of have their choice in how they wanna design. You can have same form factor, higher performance, uh, you can have, uh, a form factor with a noisy fan and you can turn that into basically no noise. Um, and, you know, even inside of the, um, yeah, I think those are the two, the two major options.

So it sounds, uh, super flexible. So we talked about the MacBook Air, I'll, I'll call it, uh, kind of test example. Um, great way to show the capability which devices feature air jet or, or which devices, you know, do you feel like your platform offers a superior experience?

Great question. We are currently, uh, designed into multiple devices. So I I'll walk them through, uh, one at one at a time.

So, but before I do that, you know, let me explain to you what the company's journey has been over the last 15 months. Ever since we came out of stealth, we came out of stealth, we introduced our product to industry, and, and the feedback has been overwhelmingly positive. You know, everybody looked at the potential of our technology and wanted to have it, so we got the right feedback saying that we were on the right track.

So we spent the next several months ensuring that we complete the design of the product, bring it to commercial quality, which meant going through rigorous reliability testing of our product and then ramping up on volume manufacturing. That was our journey in all through 2023. So we ended 2023 with the first commercial products with Air Jet hitting the market, and they're now a quick and good cadence of products that are beginning to come out.

The first product that came out was actually, uh, compact mini pc, it's compact and fan less mini pc, therefore it had very low performance. By putting two Edge Minis into it, we were able to triple the performance in the same form factor. So that was a great showcase example.

The next ones are also additional mini PCs that are using our technology. And we also have a bunch of, uh, SSD storage products that are integrating, uh, our technology into them. Because with Thunderbolt and NVME, you can actually triple, quadruple the data, read, write throughputs, but you can't do it because of thermal issues.

And we are able to solve the problem in SSD. So these are some of the early adapters of our technology, and that has given us field experience to see exactly how our product would function live in people's hands. So now building on that, um, track record, we've en we've started engaging with much larger customers who are building premium tablets and smartphones and IOT devices, edge AI devices, you know, devices that use Nvidia Jetson processor, for example, uh, that are also designed in our product.

So we are in the process of maturing, uh, their platforms with our technology integrated in, into, into it, and you'll see a continuous stream of new product, uh, announcements coming out all through this year and into next year. No, that's great. You know, if I look at, uh, the four subsystems that typically, uh, well, yeah, four subsystems that seem to get challenged, every inflection point we have, whether it was the, the dawn of the internet, uh, with the mobile phone, it's, you know, the compute memory, storage and networking.

And it seems like, uh, in all four of those, we're trying to crank up the performance, uh, reduce heat, uh, and keep the experience, uh, at least the same from a, from an auditory, uh, uh, uh, point of view. So, uh, without divulging what the future of your future roadmap, your future design wins. But hey, you can, if you want, um, what's next, uh, for Air J You know, you talked a little bit about some of the form factors, but, um, I want to give you the, the chance to, to give even more detail.

Certainly we have a computer, uh, compute X coming up, uh, late, you know, about in a month's time. So we've got some That's right. Huge announcements there that we are going to, we are going to come up with, you know, customer, you know, product launches certainly, but also new products that we're introducing.

Uh, we are building on the strength of our Edge Jet mini chip to introduce the aje pack at Compute X, which is essentially a completely self-contained cartridge that has up to five Edge minis and can remove anywhere from five to 25 watts of heat. And it's, you know, super thin, but it's cartridge. So we want to reduce the complexity of adding edges into, uh, edge G AI device or an on-device, you know, or, or a, or a ai, you know, edge device, uh, to the simplicity of what it takes to, you know, plug in or replace, uh, your battery.

So we want to come up with a CAT concept where it becomes very easy for device manufacturers to integrate our solution into their platforms. So we are going to, uh, announce the, uh, edge pack at the, uh, compute X, uh, in June in Taiwan. That's exciting.

It's exciting stuff on the move here. You mentioned that computing, you know, runs on, you know, C-P-U-G-P-U memory networking, but I would put the, I would add a fifth one to, to, to your list, the short list that without innovation I was Waiting for, for that, You're not gonna get anywhere either, so that's just as important. No, I appreciate that, and I'm, I'm gonna, I'm gonna think through that because what, what is happening is we keep busting out of, of, of these four different points and a, a conversation that goes along with that is how are we gonna power this, but how are we gonna cool this, uh, at, at, well, and you know, in the data center, it's, it's about it, it's about the cooling and the amount of energy going in and the amount of water that, that people have to bring in now.

Uh, and you know, the noise isn't really discussed, but when it comes to the edge and whether that's the edge, uh, a pc, a tablet, a smartphone, or even an an IO OT device, uh, they, you just can't be driving that, that level of noise because on the consumer side, as we know, it's annoying, uh, and it drowns out some of the enjoyments you're trying to have with all those fun things you're trying to do. But on then, on the commercial side, it's either a distraction to the worker or it's a distraction to the customer who has to be around, you know, some, some noisy, uh, devices. And, you know, in, in our research issue that we're doing about around the industrial IO ot, uh, whether it's, whether it's retail or it an airline, um, you just can't be, uh, having a noisy, uh, solution out there.

So yeah, I will, I will take this under advisement, sisu on a fifth, uh, fifth element here. Thank you. And it's not just noise, Patrick, it's not just noise.

If you are forced to use a fan, then inevitably your device is going to be bigger, it's gonna be thicker, it's gonna be more voluminous, and nobody wants that. The second thing is noise. The third is you have to surrender a couple of other attributes.

Dust. You are no longer dust proof because if you use a fan, you need to have huge vents to let air in and out. And you also have to surrender water resistance as an attribute that you have for your device.

So it's all four. And also there's a limit to how much, uh, ultimately performance, uh, fan can deliver no matter how big it gets, which is reason in data center, they're moving to water and liquid. So, so there is a ceiling to how much performance you can deliver, and you have four negatives if you, if you use the fan.

And we overcome all of those. We overcome all of those in terms of using semiconductor technology to be the first in the industry to deliver an active solid state chip for cooling. And our first generation is already on par with fans, and our subsequent generations are going to get better and better and better.

So, so we believe that we are at the beginning of a new industry that we are creating that is going to continue to pay dividends for the industry and make sure that just as compute gets more and more powerful, so does the thermal solution, and you no longer constrained in terms of delivering a high performance device that is thin, silent, dustproof and waterproof. That's our vision, and that's what, uh, we're executing to make happen. Uh, I like the vision.

I'm not, uh, I've been shy, uh, about, about sharing that, but it's super exciting. And csu, thanks again for coming on the six five. Uh, again, I think this is your third time and thank you for doing the summit, uh, 2024 here and educating us all on the value of alternative cooling solutions in this age of ai.

Thank you very much, Patrick. It's my pleasure. So here to hear six five summit day three.

We are talking modern work, and that can come in the many different forms. It can be smartphones, PCs, tablets, uh, industrial iot devices, all bursting with ai. Goodness.

You have to cool that in an appropriate way, which we talked about for the last 20 minutes. Check out all the rest of the day, three speakers here in modern work and go back to day one and two. Uh, you can go back and review all of those, whether you're interested in data center, uh, enterprise SaaS, all those goodies under the sun.

Thanks and take care.